The premise of Possible Lives is that Rose kept his ears open for news of anything good going on in schools around the country and then hopped a bus, a plane, or a car to get there so that he could spend a few days observing and trying to distill some kind of wisdom. He was most interested in schools where most of the children are children of color or children of poverty. As someone who did my own version of that in It’s Being Done, I like that idea.

But here’s the problem—we have to trust that what he sees in fact helps kids learn, because he provides no student achievement data. For example, he goes to classrooms that he describes as “whole language” classrooms where children are surrounded with the printed word. He is taken with the thoughtfulness of the teachers and the growth they are able to coax from their students.

I have no doubt that he saw children enthusiastically participating and learning in those classrooms. But were they all learning to read as well as they should have? We can’t know, because he doesn’t give us the evidence.

I have my doubts—the whole language-style classrooms I have seen that are done well seem to get somewhere in the 50 to 70 percent of kids doing well on reading assessments. That’s often a huge improvement over what went before, but it still leaves 30 to 50 percent of kids lagging behind, primarily because somewhere in the neighborhood of 30 to 50 percent of children need a more systematic, explicit approach to decoding, vocabulary formation, spelling, grammar, and background knowledge than whole language programs usually provide.

I should say it is not Rose’s fault that he doesn’t cite student achievement data and just had to follow his instinct for a good story—for the most part there wasn’t good student achievement data that went down to the school level in the 1990s. It is only in the past few years that we have gained access to school-level student achievement data, mostly as a result of federal law that requires that students be tested every year in reading and math from third to eighth grades and once in high school (beginning this year, states must also test in science).

Rose has deep reservations about the data that has been developed as a result of the federal school accountability system. He cites quality issues—not all the states have particularly good tests—and psychometric issues—many of the tests were not designed to make school-wide judgments.

But what is interesting to me is that, despite those reservations, he acknowledges that:

…there are aspects of test-based accountability systems that are clearly democratic. The assumption that all children can learn and develop. The responsibility of public institutions to their citizenry. The dissatisfaction—sometimes stated, sometimes implied—with business-as-usual and a belief that institutions can be improved.

This is clearly uncomfortable territory for Rose—he is much more comfortable saying that tests can’t possibly gauge all that is important about a classroom and student learning, and documenting the complex teaching-and-learning interactions that go on between teachers and students and among students themselves. But, as he says:

There is no doubt that such programs of testing have jolted some low performing schools to evaluate and redirect their inadequate curricula.

This is quite an admission from someone who would not ordinarily be thought to be a friend to testing systems.

Certainly he is concerned, and rightly so, that some of the responses by teachers, principals, and superintendents have been thoughtless and even foolish—what he calls “a strictly functional and unimaginative curriculum (which, admittedly, might be better than what came before)” rather than what it should be—“a rich course of study that, as a byproduct, affects test scores.”

He calls for a much deeper commitment to helping teachers understand what it is they should teach and how children learn. He is absolutely right about that.

But he is willing to have a serious conversation about what it is schools should be doing and what we as a polity have the right to expect of them, and that makes Possible Lives a welcome contribution to the literature on the subject.